Today, Microsoft releases Office 2013—the first full release of Microsoft's latest-generation productivity suite for consumers. Office 2013 has already made a partial debut on Microsoft's Windows RT tablets, though RT users will get a (slight) refresh with the full availability of the suite. The company gave consumers an open preview of Office last summer, which we reviewed in depth at the time of the suite's announcement.

So there aren't any real surprises in the final versions of the applications being releasing today, at least as far as how they look and work. Today's release, however, marks the first general availability of Microsoft's new subscription model under the Office 365 brand the company has used for its hosted mail and collaboration services for businesses. While the applications in Office are being offered in a number of ways, Microsoft is trying hard to steer consumer customers to Office 365 Home Premium Edition, a service-based version of the suite that will sell for $100 a year.

And just as Windows 8's app store started to fill up as the operating system approached release, the same is true of Office's own app store—an in-app accessible collection of Web-powered functionality add-ons for many of the core Office applications based on the same core technologies (JavaScript and HTML5) that power many of Windows 8's interface-formerly-known-as-Metro apps. Now, the trick is getting consumers to buy into the idea of Office as a subscription service and embracing Microsoft's Office "lifestyle," instead of something they buy once and hold onto until their computers end up in the e-waste pile.

The pompatus of Office

Microsoft has done a lot to sweeten the pot to attract consumers into the subscription model, enlisting nearly everything but the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. While the lowest-cost perpetual-license version of Office 2013—Office 2013 Home and Student—is priced at just under $140 and includes the four core applications (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote), Office 365 Home Premium Edition comes with all of those applications plus the Outlook mail and calendar client, Access database, and Publisher desktop publishing tool.

Home Premium also comes with licenses for five installs of the suite—including Office 2011 for Mac installs for those households with mixed operating system allegiances. Home and Student has been trimmed down to allowing just one installation per license. And as part of its subscription, customers will also get 60 minutes a month of Skype calls to phone numbers within the US (as Microsoft continues to position Skype as the consumer version of its Lync enterprise voice, video, and messaging service). And it comes with an additional 20 gigabytes of SkyDrive cloud storage.

We've reviewed most of these applications in depth, but it's worth reviewing the major changes to them one more time in case you missed Microsoft's Office 2013 marketing machine. The biggest change across the board is that the interfaces for all of the Office apps have been thematically updated in an attempt to make them less cluttered and more amenable to tablet users. There's also a new add-on "app" interface for Office that plugs into most (but not all) of the applications in Home Premium.

The most heavily updated of the applications in terms of functionality is Word 2013. Its collaboration capabilities have been updated. While Office 2010 provided some SkyDrive-based document sharing, Word 2013 adds a co-editing capability that allows multiple people to work on a SkyDrive (or SharePoint) shared doc. It's not Google Docs in terms of live joint editing, but it's a step forward. Another gift to collaborators is a new simplified markup process for tracking changes and comments that allow collaborators to leave threaded discussions on the content.

Since Microsoft sees more users reading Word documents online instead of in print, the Office team added a view just for reading documents (particularly suited for people who read Word docs from tablets). Word now also has online content embedding—including videos—and provides better image placement and layout tools. Perhaps most important to anyone who deals with masses of PDF documents, Word now has full PDF import, too.

Outlook 2013 has been tweaked heavily in the name of making it equally desktop and tablet friendly. There are mouse-hover popups that show contextually appropriate information, taking Windows 8's "People" feature and putting it on steroids. This feature extends Microsoft's “social connector" social networks integration, so the mail and contact management software now detects when a person has multiple contact cards and merges them into a single “people card” view. Other new features of the interface include “peeks,” which allow you to hover the mouse pointer over the tabs for the various parts of Office’s interface (Calendar, People, and Tasks) and get a pop-up view of what lies beneath. There's also now the ability to write in-line replies in Outlook's message preview pane, reducing the amount of window bouncing required to get a quick answer off to someone.

Enlarge/ A look at Outlook's "peeks" within the contact management view.

Excel 2013takes more of the high-end features for data analysis and charting—formerly the domain of Excel power users—and puts them within easier grasp of casual users. (You may now find friends publishing Pivot Tables that analyze their fantasy football teams.) The Quick Analysis “lens,” a feature activated when you highlight a block of cells, provides some canned charting, formatting, and data processing options—including Pivot Tables—based on a pattern analysis of the content in the selected cells. It will also be easier to convert those roster stats copied from webpages into useful data, thanks to a new “flash fill” feature. Flash fill uses pattern analysis to detect when a user is retyping content from another column, then automatically fills the rest of the column out.

Enlarge/ The Quick Analysis "lens" can look at the columns of data in a selected block of cells and suggest auto-created pivot views based on their contents, previewing the table before you click it.

PowerPoint 2013has become an online content-borrowing machine. Users can grab images from beyond the Office template library—from social networks and other image-sharing sites—while searching and browsing them directly from the PowerPoint interface. There are new drawing and charting tools to help create what can't be appropriated from elsewhere, and a new presenter mode is targeted at making it easier for tablet-luggers to plug into a display and have their notes in front of them.

PowerPoint's new Presenter view showing what's now and next, along with slide notes.

We didn't look at Access 2013 in our initial review of the Office preview, but it's clear Microsoft has very specific cloud-based plans for the database tool. Unfortunately, for most home users, its one really impressive new feature—the ability to create database Web applications—is sort of moot. This is because its incarnation in Home Premium requires a SharePoint server with the proper templates to support it. Access has dramatically simplified the process of creating database applications. For home users, it's relatively painless to create and build local databases without doing any coding.

Enlarge/ Creating input forms for Access databases is drag-and-drop painless. Sadly, there's no way to publish the forms as a Web application to anything other than SharePoint in the Home Premium Edition release.

As a former FoxPro developer, I kept looking for places to write my legacy Clipper code. There is a Visual Basic for Applications editor, but that's a rabbit hole most average Office users will not want to go down. Access doesn't take advantage of any of the Office store app technology, so you'll have to roll your own integration with Web services if you want to do that visualization—either that, or connect to your Access database with Excel. We'll take a deeper look at Access when we review the still-pending general release of Office Pro, Exchange, and SharePoint.

OneNote 2013, the information organizing application, was the only one of the core Office applications to get a full Windows 8 makeover with a Metro interface. However, the Metro interface used in Office on Windows RT didn't get installed when I loaded up Home Premium. Instead, I got the standard desktop interface only. It is good at collecting information from screen shots, Web clippings, and randomly scrawled notes. Peter Bright has looked deeply into OneNote, and I've tried to use it some myself. Its usefulness increases exponentially if you're a Windows Phone 8 owner. I guess.

Enlarge/ Some day, I'll actually figure out something useful to do with OneNote 2013.

Finally, one application we didn't look at in our Office preview reviews was Publisher, Microsoft's desktop document publishing tool that also has some basic Web publishing capabilities.

In my experience, both of these options work fine for personal use, if you're in your own bubble. The problem is everybody ELSE is using MS Office. Their documents don't always render well in the free alternatives.

The price makes this whole offering a non-starter. Home users are never going to want to spend $100/year on Office. A lot of people have $400 laptops, paying 1/4 that on software a year doesn't make sense. Even if they have a pressing need for Microsoft Office they can get the perpetual licensed Office Home and Student for $139.00.

Microsoft needs to learn that software as a service only works if it's significantly less money than a perpetually licensed alternative. If they try to do this by raising the price of regular versions of Office they'll have people jumping ship left and right. What they need to do is come up with a pricing scheme that will actually make sense to their customers for a version without the pro tools (Say Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Onenote) for about $29.99 a year. Otherwise they're just pricing themselves out of the market and home users will just use OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice or Google Docs.

The price makes this whole offering a non-starter. Home users are never going to want to spend $100/year on Office. A lot of people have $400 laptops, paying 1/4 that on software a year doesn't make sense. Even if they have a pressing need for Microsoft Office they can get the perpetual licensed Office Home and Student for $139.00.

Microsoft needs to learn that software as a service only works if it's significantly less money than a perpetually licensed alternative. If they try to do this by raising the price of regular versions of Office they'll have people jumping ship left and right. What they need to do is come up with a pricing scheme that will actually make sense to their customers for a version without the pro tools (Say Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Onenote) for about $29.99 a year. Otherwise they're just pricing themselves out of the market and home users will just use OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice or Google Docs.

Maybe, but as of 2010, office held a 94% majority

I think you might be missing the simple strategy of pricing an item/service high and then lowering the price to what the market will bear...

Edit 6: Looks like we have a winner! Bring your ticket stub to the customer fulfillment center to claim your prize. Please have ready two forms of ID and $125 for processing and miscellaneous service fees.

Office Suite is boring, but it is the gold standard of Office productivity suites. All the one-off versions out there, open office, libre office, google docs are all okish, but none of them compare to MS Office Suite. And while MS is extremely late to getting Office out to Android, IOS, etc, having real Office will prove to be more valuable than ever.

This thing is not something I would use. The primary reason being is "the cloud" thing MS keeps pushing, although a neat or good idea depending on your point of view the "cloud" for something like this simply does not offer a lot of assurances for security of personal documents and the like. You don't know who behind the "cloud" actually gets access to your stuff or what they do with it and you have no means to check their integrity plus if some idiots like Anonymous come along with their childish agnst and hatred of everything there goes your stuff if they so desire.

OneNote, thats something you either have a use for but not everyone will. I personally don't like it but thats mainly because I do not have a real use for it.

The cost, well, who wants to keep paying to rent when you can own. I'd rather simply buy the Office Suite once (as I already have) instead of basically renting it.

Seriously, this "hey buy this thing that you don't really own!" cloud/"service" based software needs to stop. I honestly don't think we'll see any change in this regard until there's a big enough digital retailer burst (Steam disappearing, Amazon discontinuing/losing digital sales on something, PSN going offline and taking it's games with it, etc) and enough people are effected that digital ownership is seriously looked at and reformed to make sense for a digital age.

The problem is everybody ELSE is using MS Office. Their documents don't always render well in the free alternatives.

I'd like to know how strong this argument really is. How dominant is MS Office nowadays? 99% of the market? 95%? 90%? 80%? Even less?

On rendering: I replaced MS Office years ago with Google Docs and Libre Office. And although some of the formatting is always a bit off when I open a .docx or .pptx or .xls in one of those, it's never a problem - it just looks different.

It's a shame they didn't sweeten the deal with Office Exchange accounts instead of offering Skype minutes. I've been using 2013 for the past two months, and it's quite a significant upgrade, unlike 2007 to 2010. The entire suite runs off DirectX and is dramatically improved. It instantly renders graphs in Excel so you can easily preview and find what you are looking for. The cursor in both Excel and Word now scroll smoothly instead of jumping from character to character or cell to cell. And if you are running a business OneNote is just awesome for archiving purposes. Sure this may all sound aesthetic but then again that's the theme this year isn't it?

As usual MS Office looks better and stronger than any other alternative, Libre, Open, Google Docs are not even close to what Office can do. But MS Office is an overkill for most of the users that just want to type simple docs, it would be interesting to know how many people really uses Office advantages.I guess that for the people that really needs this set of tools the price is right, but not for me, I can do pretty much all that I want with Google Docs.

As usual MS Office looks better and stronger than any other alternative, Libre, Open, Google Docs are not even close to what Office can do. But MS Office is an overkill for most of the users that just want to type simple docs, it would be interesting to know how many people really uses Office advantages.I guess that for the people that really needs this set of tools the price is right, but not for me, I can do pretty much all that I want with Google Docs.

So in that case, if you want to stay MS Office, use the free Office Web Apps that are built into SkyDrive.

Good review. Appreciate the detail. I don't know how many companies would allow their employees to put documents on MS servers.

sigmasirrus wrote:

Midurin wrote:

In an age of Google docs and libre office, why?

In my experience, both of these options work fine for personal use, if you're in your own bubble. The problem is everybody ELSE is using MS Office. Their documents don't always render well in the free alternatives.

You are correct to a certain degree. If you are in a situation where multiple versions of MS Office is used, documents don't render well either. My company for example we have 3 different versions of MS Office being used and 2 different versions within my department. Can't really create macros in Excel due to differences and documents (Excel & Word especially) don't render the same. Simple docs and spreadsheet it is generally a non issue. Reports where formatting matters, we end up creating pdfs. Ideally IT should have the same version of software throughout the company.

As a consumer I don't see the advantage of using MS Office as a subscription service and if I need Office for work purposes, I have a work laptop. I wish I could find the stat Microsoft published when they came out with the ribbon interface in which a high percent of Excel users use a small subset of the functions.

MS Office is still the only option if you are a power user and excel especially is really good. If I had kids I would probably buy MS Office because of how many companies use it. As long as MS Office Home & Student is still provided, that would be the option I would get if I needed Office on a home machine.

I don't understand why so few people use OneNote... it is by far one of the most useful applications in the Office suite!

Being that it is the digital equivalent of a notebook, it is extremely useful to students, as they can use it for taking notes in class. It makes managing notes much easier and means you don't have to lug around reams of paper.

I've also found it to be useful in work as a software developer to keep track of things and to document things roughly, and to list links to resources, tools and texts useful for my work.

The problem is everybody ELSE is using MS Office. Their documents don't always render well in the free alternatives.

I'd like to know how strong this argument really is. How dominant is MS Office nowadays? 99% of the market? 95%? 90%? 80%? Even less?

On rendering: I replaced MS Office years ago with Google Docs and Libre Office. And although some of the formatting is always a bit off when I open a .docx or .pptx or .xls in one of those, it's never a problem - it just looks different.

I think the incompatibility argument with the free stuff is just nitpicking. If you're using something truly proprietary (i.e. VBA) then of course you're locked in. If you're not, then switching versions of Office seems just as disruptive as switching to Google docs.

I think they're as dominant as they ever were in their main market - you know, pc-using businesses. Trouble is, all those side markets are drying up: home, mobile, etc.

Since this is about the home version, I'd guess market share is dropping off. It was always weak from piracy, but now people don't care enough to bother. The Mac-based product is probably going to be their most popular one, as Macs are purchased by people who tend to be affluent (or money-wasters, depending on your fanboy persuasion). They most likely collapsed the Mac license into the Windows one to obfuscate adoption rates. And after all, most Mac users using Office will also have the money to pay full price for Windows and boot into that, too.

In my experience the only one out of LibreOffice and Google Docs that comes close to MS is the MS Word and its counterpart. For everything else the alternatives still have a long way to go before they're close to MS.

I don't understand why so few people use OneNote... it is by far one of the most useful applications in the Office suite!

Being that it is the digital equivalent of a notebook, it is extremely useful to students, as they can use it for taking notes in class. It makes managing notes much easier and means you don't have to lug around reams of paper.

I've also found it to be useful in work as a software developer to keep track of things and to document things roughly, and to list links to resources, tools and texts useful for my work.

I've noticed that note-taking of this sort is a niche activity. Journalists, of course, students, maybe, most people, never. Not that we don't all write a note down, but the number of us doing anything more than a simple list that can go on our smartphones is vanishingly small. I tried to like evernote, for example, I just have no use for anything more than typing in a few words. Ever. As a data analyst, admin, trainer, etc. Some people need many notes, some people don't think that way, I guess.

The price makes this whole offering a non-starter. Home users are never going to want to spend $100/year on Office. A lot of people have $400 laptops, paying 1/4 that on software a year doesn't make sense. Even if they have a pressing need for Microsoft Office they can get the perpetual licensed Office Home and Student for $139.00.

Because Google Docs still can't do text boxes, columns, equations, or any style of formating that doesn't involve changing the size and alignment of text (essentially)? Its completely incompatible with any IEEE templates I've tried.

Office for Windows Phone is probably more sophisticated, and even the free WordPad application included with Windows 7 & 8 is more capable. (Though of severe importance, it lacks spellchecking) And those are damn 'lite' versions themselves.

Libre office however is nowhere near as incompetent, and should fulfill most usage scenarios.

Too many bells and whistles for routine office use, and certainly not going to pay $100 a year for 2013 when I have 2007 running just fine on all other machines. As I have a small office staff, it is cheaper and easier for me to migrate to Libre Office and use Windows Live Mail.

What I see here is a software suite with so many gizmos that folks (me, at least) will get lost in tinkering with the software rather than simply changing a font, typing what needs typing, and getting on to the next work item. Or folks (like me again) will just ignore all the gee-whiz stuff and just use the suite like we'd use Wordpad, and end up wasting $100 a yer per copy for a text editor.

Excuse me, but $99.99 per year for five (5!) legally-installed copies of the full Office suite + additional 20GB (each!) of SkyDrive space + Skype minutes is a very good deal!

This is the big problem with you Googlified bloggers. Everything has to be free... as long as Google is allowed to index your whole life. Not for me, thank you. Fortunately, I have a real job that allows me to pay that piddling amount so my family of four can enjoy a superior, seamless web-enabled Office productivity solution.

PowerPoint 2013 has become an online content borrowing machine. Users can grab images from beyond the Office template library—from social networks and other image-sharing sites—while searching and browsing them directly from the PowerPoint interface.

"Borrowing" is not the correct way to phrase this.

"Copyright infringement facilitation" is more accurate.

It's a nice idea, and I'm sure it's well implemented. But does it warn the user about their copyright obligations? Does it handle licensing issues?

If not, I suspect that lawsuits will follow, after people have been sued by other people for their infringement.Yes, in theory, Microsoft's EULA protects them.

In practice, in many jurisdictions it's worth the paper that it - and the Office 2013 manual - are written on.

So on the student edition, with one install, if i format my computer and need to reinstall everything, is my license stil valid? I read that the 'home premium' edition can manage subscriptions online but I may have missed it for the other edition?

Also my place doesnt really feel like a 'home premium'. Maybe I can convince them to give me the standard edition.

One of these days I will learn what OneNote is or why I should be using it. It just sits here on my work laptop...ignored.

Speaking of work, while businesses' might be willing ot eat up subscription costs, there is no way they will allow proprietary and confidential documents on anyone elses' servers. Something else that doesnt work to Microsoft's advantage? Our computers still run XP (I am not upset at this) and we just bumped up to Office 07 (some of us) in the past year. Yep...Fortune 10 company on the cutting edge!.

One Note is actually pretty handy. It's like Post-It Notes Power Users Edition (does that stand up to Microsoft Naming Standards?)

You can take screenshots, copy parts of documents or drop some media file types in to it. They get embedded on a "page".

You can then type on that page to add your own notes if you want, or if you're ink-enabled you can write on the page directly.

Furthermore, you can organize the pages in to collections of notebooks and even organize those further by category.

And finally, you can search it all - but not just what you typed in - it does a pretty fantastic job of reading handwriting. It also can scan text out of images you copy and pasted in and will search all that too.

Then, to put the icing on this cake, you can share the data files for one or more of your notebooks over the network so multiple people can update them (at the same time!) and you get all this in real time - collaborative style.

One Note - once you start using it, you realize it's note-taking on crack...

The problem is everybody ELSE is using MS Office. Their documents don't always render well in the free alternatives.

I'd like to know how strong this argument really is. How dominant is MS Office nowadays? 99% of the market? 95%? 90%? 80%? Even less?

On rendering: I replaced MS Office years ago with Google Docs and Libre Office. And although some of the formatting is always a bit off when I open a .docx or .pptx or .xls in one of those, it's never a problem - it just looks different.

Spoken like someone that doesn't interact with a lot of businesses. Yes, Google docs can render a usable approximation of MS docs. But you simply cannot edit them and send them back and forth to the author. Try taking a 200 page technical manual with hundreds of index tags, equations, graphics, edit this in Google docs and send the mess back to the creator. You won't be doing business with that company anymore. Google docs works fine if you work at Google and everyone else is using it or for your personal stuff but it doesn't cut it the real world. It seems every time an article about MS Office comes up people post how they hate office and you don't need it anymore with Libreoffice and Google office. It may be nice you can avoid it, but the simple reality is MS Office is the de facto standard in the real world. Period.

Excuse me, but $99.99 per year for five (5!) legally-installed copies of the full Office suite + additional 20GB (each!) of SkyDrive space + Skype minutes is a very good deal!

This is the big problem with you Googlified bloggers. Everything has to be free... as long as Google is allowed to index your whole life. Not for me, thank you. Fortunately, I have a real job that allows me to pay that piddling amount so my family of four can enjoy a superior, seamless web-enabled Office productivity solution.

I guess we just live in different worlds.

Pretty much. The advocates of Google everything don't seem to understand in the real world the standard Office productivity suit is MS Office and that Google's offerings are nowhere near s robust a solution. My last place of employment fired our old IT director and hired the new guy who was anti-Microsoft. He even said as much. So he started trying to move us away from MS and over to Google and Apple. He talked up the idea pretty well and got the higher ups on board. I and the other admins were trying to point out what we would be losing by doing this but no one listened. Once the move was done very few people liked it. They soon found Google Docs lacked many of the features our users wanted and needed. Let's not go into the loss of access to various business applications our users were used to and forced to learn new applications which in the end didn't do everything they needed.

PowerPoint 2013 has become an online content borrowing machine. Users can grab images from beyond the Office template library—from social networks and other image-sharing sites—while searching and browsing them directly from the PowerPoint interface.

"Borrowing" is not the correct way to phrase this.

"Copyright infringement facilitation" is more accurate.

It's a nice idea, and I'm sure it's well implemented. But does it warn the user about their copyright obligations? Does it handle licensing issues?

If not, I suspect that lawsuits will follow, after people have been sued by other people for their infringement.Yes, in theory, Microsoft's EULA protects them.

In practice, in many jurisdictions it's worth the paper that it - and the Office 2013 manual - are written on.

These are issues the user needs make themselves aware of. The application vendor is not obligated to make them aware of issues they should already know. If they were that EULA would be even bigger and people would STILL not read it.

your comment made me laugh. It made me think of expecting gun vendors to make sure everyone who buys a gun is aware of things like murder is illegal and so on.

Sean Gallagher / Sean is Ars Technica's IT Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.